This invention concerns a widescreen television system that is compatible with conventional television receivers having a relatively smaller display aspect ratio.
A conventional television receiver, such as a receiver in accordance with NTSC broadcast standards adopted in the United States and elsewhere, has a 4:3 aspect ration (the ratio of the width to the height of a displayed image). Recently, there has been interest in using higher aspect ratios for television receiver systems, such as 2:1, 16:9 or 5:3, since such higher aspect ratios more nearly approximate or equal the aspect ration of the human eye than does the 4:3 aspect ratio of a conventional television receiver. Video information signals with a 5:3 aspect ratio have received particular attention since this ratio approximates that of motion picture film, and thus such signals can be transmitted and received without cropping the image information. However, widescreen television systems which simply transmit signals having an increased aspect ratio as compared to conventional systems are incompatible with conventional aspect ratio receivers. This makes widespread adoption of widescreen systems difficult.
It is therefore desirable to have a widescreen television system that is compatible with conventional television receivers. In accordance with the principles of the present invention, there are disclosed herein method and apparatus for encoding and decoding a compatible widescreen video signal representing a picture having an aspect ratio greater than the standard 4:3 aspect ratio.